Crazy for God

by Frank Schaeffer

  GW was a prep school—in other words, a private boarding school for boys aged five to thirteen. “Prep” stood for preparatory. What we were being prepared for was entrance into a select public school. And everything came down to the Common Entrance (CE) exam.

  A public school was a private (usually all boys or all girls) boarding high school. Most of the boys in public schools would have attended prep schools since they were five. Home for them was where you visited during the “holls.” By age eighteen, they had spent less time with their parents and siblings than most American children spend with their families before they’re eight.

  The aim of the staff at GW was to make sure that we passed the CE exam with marks high enough to be admitted to the public school of our parents’ choice. In the case of most of the boys, this meant they would go where their fathers had gone. The well-connected, rich, and lucky few would attend schools like Eton, Rugby, or Harrow; the rest of us would head to lesser schools. The public school you went to determined what university you got into. That would decide your fate.

  The “brainy boys” would some day get “firsts” from Cambridge or Oxford; the lesser mortals would get lesser degrees from lesser colleges, and some might even be relegated to trade schools. A lack of seriousness about one’s studies could always be cured by the oft-repeated phrase “You won’t be so pleased with yourself when you get those CE results!” The twice-yearly mock CE exams, taken by all the boys in fourth, fifth, and sixth forms, loomed large.

  While looking at other boys’ confident faces as they bent over their mock CE exam papers, I felt the vastness of my ignorance spread out in front of me like a dark toxic pool. I had just turned eleven and was just starting real school for the first time in my life. I could read and write—haltingly—but not much else. The only subjects I was any good at were history and geography. Mom’s reading out loud, the discussions I heard, and the living tableau of human geography that came and went through L’Abri paid off when it came to general knowledge.

  I could not spell anything in English correctly, let alone in French, let alone comprehend anything Mr. Rouse was trying to impart in Latin class. And math was a closed book. I was good at French, or at least the Swiss Canton of Vaud-accented French spoken in our village, but, of course, not the grammar.

  “It’s a verb!” Mr. Marsh, the French master (and soccer coach) said.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Well, get on with it, lad.”

  “Yes, sir,” I answered, while staring into the distance and waiting for inspiration.

  “Well, Schaeffer, what’s the problem?”

  “Nothing, sir.”

  “But you haven’t written anything. As I said, it is just an ordinary verb!”

  “But, sir?”

  “Yes, boy?”

  “What is a verb?”

  In 1962, there were many thousands of prep schools like GW feeding many hundreds of public schools. There were rumblings that the Labor government would someday shut down “elitist” private schools in favor of government schools; but, other than that, the whole system seemed secure and as much a part of the English landscape as the local pub. Some prep schools were miniature hells reminiscent of something out of Dickens, where bullying and brutal caning were facts of life. Sometimes when we visited another school to play them at soccer, the place would seem grim and the boys looked a “sorry lot.” We always stayed for tea after the match and sometimes heard whispered stories about what had happened to this or that boy or cousin at this or that prep school where bullying was allowed, perhaps even encouraged as a rite of passage by sadistic masters. But there were also many places like Great Walstead, solidly middle-class, with a distinctive religious character of one sort or another ranging from Anglican to Roman Catholic, Baptist, and all points in between. Most of them seemed like happy places, at least the dozen or so I visited from time to time as a member of the First Eleven.

  At GW, our religion was Mr. Parke’s religion, a sensible low-church Anglicanism. A jolly local Church of England priest, Father Sheldon—the father of Paul Sheldon, a tall, gangling bespectacled boy who was our best cricket bowler and one of my best friends—came to the school to conduct chapel on some Sundays. The rest of the time, Mr. Parke and the teachers led our short and lighthearted Sunday and daily chapel services. They tended to reflect the theology of the master taking them, or, in the case of “Bubble,” his cantankerous atheism.

  The only remnants from the school’s founding were Mr. Alban and Mr. Brabey, both of whom had fought in World War I. We called Mr. Alban “Bubble,” because of his snuff habit that resulted in congested breathing that sounded disgustingly like a kettle bubbling. His snuff-taking gave us opportunities to watch in delighted disgust as noxious brown juice trickled out of his bulbous red nose and stained his upper lip, before Bubble would wipe his nose with the brown-stained handkerchief he kept shoved up the sleeve of his ubiquitous, shapeless, and patched navy-blue cardigan.

  Everything about Bubble reeked of nicotine, and everything on or near him was stained yellowy-brown. His thinning hair was always greasy and his sallow skin the color of putty. He was short and had bad teeth.

  Bubble taught us to make Molotov cocktails, which we threw on the old tennis court, sending fireballs up into the air like miniature nuclear mushroom clouds. He showed us how to bayonet an attacker. He told us stories about the Home Guard of WWII, “not my war, mind you, but they had me organizing the local chaps.”

  Bubble would gleefully try to turn us against God. He raved about the wonders of evolution, more as a personal manifesto than as science. He also made a big point of advertising his far right political sympathies.

  Once Bubble put some boys in detention, including me, who argued with his assertion that anyone who believed in God was “thick as mud.” When he put us in detention for believing in God, we appealed to Mr. Parke, who upheld Bubble’s right to punish us unreasonably, but who also told us he thought it was “jolly unfair,” but that we, like the “martyrs during Bloody Mary’s reign, should suffer gladly for your faith.” Mr. Parke laughed when he said this, and detention was not so terrible. All we did was sit at our desks doing a bit of extra studying.

  Bubble was one of our favorite teachers, and the ruder he was, the more we liked him. Mr. Parke knew that we knew that his allowing Bubble to be unreasonable was some huge game, and we were all in on the joke.

  Both Bubble and Mr. Brabey were past retirement age and had become as much part of the school as the massive oaks and cedars towering over the lawn. They puttered around “teaching” and generally being the sorts of characters that only the English have a way of nonchalantly putting up with, the sorts of eccentrics who send a boy to half an hour of detention for saying God exists.

  Mr. Brabey was assigned to tutor me in extra math when, about halfway through my first term, it became apparent to Mr. Parke that I was so woefully behind in every subject that I’d have to undergo extra tutoring in just about everything. “It’s as if you’ve had no education at all. What have you been doing?” asked Mr. Parke during one of our many “My dear chap, this just won’t do!” meetings.

  Old Brabey was living in a damp, closet-sized room next to the school kitchen that smelled of mildew and the glue from the lifelike models of animals he made out of plastic wood, then carved with files. Brabey was bald, short, and fat with a kindly face, a pudgy triple chin, and a fringe of yellowing white hair around his shiny pate. He was easy to distract, and we did very little extra math.

  Brabey had been a stretcher-bearer in World War I. His face and hands were the color of boiled lobster, a bright reddish-pink that only the perpetually chilly English seem to be afflicted with, along with cold- and damp-related ailments like “chilblains.” “Old Brabey” (as we boys called him) dressed in baggy heather-colored tweeds and sometimes smelled of undergarments past their prime.

  I spent many a gray afternoon listening to harrowing tales of life in the muddy, rat-infested trenches. Each lesson
in trench warfare ended when Old Brabey would shout furiously that I was distracting him from teaching me math—or “sums,” as he called it.

  “But, sir, I have not tried to distract you, sir.”

  “Wipe that grin off your silly face! Do you think this is amusing? I weep for you, boy! I weep!”

  “Yes, sir.”

  I’d sit staring out the high window at the lawn and distant sodden cricket pitch soaking up yet more drizzle, the view made wobbly by the wavy Victorian glass panes while visions of men on stretchers, brains blown out, mingled with the view of the English countryside.

  “He died the worst death there was, lad: gas!”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Choked his life away before me, me a helpless stretcher-bearer and not one thing I could do for my own brother!”

  “Yes, sir. Sorry, sir.”

  “Have you ever seen someone die in a gas attack, lad?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Well, I did! My own brother! Clarence, poor Cla—”

  Brabey dabbed at his puffy eyes with his inky handkerchief. A tear would roll down his cheek and hang trembling from his yellowing nose whiskers, then splash on my notebook and make the pale cheap ink run.

  Boys with parents close by went home for one or two weekends per term. I went with friends or to my sister Susan, who had just moved from Huémoz to live in London. Once per term, I took the train from Hayward’s Heath to Victoria Station and then the tube to Ealing for a long weekend. Susan and Ranald provided a home away from home. Margaret, their daughter, was born before they left Switzerland, and soon they had another daughter, Kirsty.

  Ranald made it clear that at the English L’Abri, he was going to do things his way. “We will not be as disorganized as The Work in Huémoz,” he would say, and “We will put more emphasis on study.” Ranald was going to be a L’Abri missionary, but not like “your loud father who shouts when he preaches.”

  I learned that the British, including Ranald, felt rather superior to everyone else, especially to Americans. There was a right way to do things, the British way. I learned that when a woman walked into a room, you stood, and that you did not talk to an adult with your hands in your pockets. I called my school masters “sir.” I addressed women by their last name, as in “Yes, Mrs. Parke.” I did not “sneak” (tell on people). I did not lie, or when I did I made sure never to be caught; and, when confronted, I learned to admit what I had done in an “honorable English way,” by raising my hand quickly and “owning up” to having been the boy to have done whatever it was I had done.

  I was doing my best to rise above my embarrassing shouts-when-he-preaches father. I had cricket whites and a fine bright pink blazer and school cap. When they sang “God Save the Queen,” I stood. I not only knew who Gilbert and Sullivan were, I sang in HMS Pinafore. (I also played the Count in the Marriage of Figaro.) I could even quote a little Shakespeare and was studying Macbeth. I had wealthy English friends whose fathers would pick me up in their Jags and Bentleys for a weekend. I would hang around on the David Spinks’ farm with Spink One and shoot starlings with his air gun, or at the posh Robin Spink house with their heated pool and little dog that would hump your leg.

  There was only one problem. My passport to this pleasant club could and would be revoked unless I passed the Common Entrance exam. And I knew that if you peeled back the top layer of my polite English schoolboy veneer, you would find a horribly ignorant young man, one who could talk without putting his hands in his pockets—Mrs. Parke only had to remind me once—but who also did not understand the first thing about geometry, spelling, and Latin and never would. I knew I was doomed.

  30

  I had grown up with the idea that God wanted me to be strange, perpetually weird, perpetually different. For the first time in my life, I encountered people like Mr. Parke who seemed to share my parents’ evangelical faith but didn’t set themselves apart from the world. The thought that you could be a normal person and still believe was new to me.

  At GW, it was good enough to just show up in chapel, be polite, and let God do the worrying about how sincere other people were. There were several teachers besides Bubble who were unbelievers, and they were all in good standing.

  When Bubble took chapel, he once had us sing some odd ditty he’d written, set to Wagner as the “hymn” and smirked while he read the scripture passage of the day. Mr. Parke bore this with a good humor that only served to make his faith seem unassailable. Mr. Parke believed what he believed, and Bubble believed what he believed, and there was room for all of us.

  GW was actually a rather humble little place, with minimal facilities beyond a wonderful natural setting. The fees were low, the classrooms bare, cold, and ugly. But Mr. Parke’s philosophy of education—it was about finding something each boy could be good at, opening doors beyond mere exams, about learning basic rules of politeness that would serve you all your life—was wonderful. And most of the teachers were highly eccentric, and therefore interesting. That was all that mattered.

  Mrs. Parke was a particularly magnificent teacher. She understood exactly how to make history come alive for little boys by describing torture, mayhem, battles, murders, plots, heroic deeds, imprisonments, voyages, the Black Death, all in glowing Shakespearean detail. Sometimes she would demonstrate how the rack had been used and lay on the teacher’s table, arms stretched above her head, her gray wool knee-length skirt tucked neatly under her trim body, and she would describe in detail just how Guy Fawkes or other traitors felt as bones were pulled from sockets, and then how they would be hanged, “just for a bit,” then taken down, revived, and quartered.

  Dates, names, and places, the whole shape of history, stuck, glued into our little brains.

  “And then the ax fell!”

  “Please, Mrs. Parke, where did the king’s head go?”

  “Into a basket, or onto the straw put there to soak up the gouts of blood!”

  “Do you think he knew?”

  “Certainly. I expect the brain stayed alive for several horrifying seconds. And, of course, the body would twitch a good bit.”

  My world got bigger. Instead of saving men’s souls, my days consisted of learning history from Mrs. Parke, learning to play cricket (badly), being surprisingly competitive at high jump (my right leg was three times as strong as any other right leg at GW), and joining the rifle club and discovering that I was a good shot. I also discovered that other boys shared my interest in women.

  It didn’t take much in those days. The “naughty postcards” were hardly explicit. They were drawn somewhat in the style of the early Vargas pinups, usually of a young woman in some suggestive pose with a witty caption. There was a girl on a swing, with the breeze lifting her skirt to reveal stocking tops and tight panties molded to her figure. A farmer was walking past with his rake over his shoulder, the inference being that the handle was going to penetrate where all we boys—passing the card around—longed to go. The expression on the girl’s face was shocked but pleased, her mouth frozen in a startled “O!”

  When we “wanked,” we didn’t think of it as sex—at least the other boys didn’t, to the extent they talked about it. (I did not advertise the amateur gynecological training that Mom had given me!) “Sex” was that far-off thing they dreamed about doing to girls. And our dreams were not terribly specific: just addled, and usually somewhat romantic, thoughts about “girls,” or “a girl.” Real girls and actual sex seemed farther off than Mars. (Matron and the other females in the school seemed to be living behind a thick sheet of glass.)

  When we wanked in a group from time to time—usually in the forest while taking a break from building a camp, raft, or fort—it was a game, something like armwrestling but where everyone could win. We sometimes compared the distances we could shoot sperm. It was matter-of-fact and jovial, a community undertaking.

  Mr. Parke advised us against all forms of “abuse.” However, he only mentioned this once in the context of the Sixth Form (eighth grade) facts-
of-life talk. The rest of the time, no one said anything about wanking, pro or con. Since everyone teaching at the school knew everything there is to know about boys, I’m sure it was no mystery to them that there was some “bashing the bishop” going on. No one seemed upset. We were never lied to and told any of the mythology that I’ve read other boys were told, stories about masturbation driving you mad. It just wasn’t that important. Privacy was respected.

  Every other week, Mr. Parke rented a movie and showed it on Sunday evening on a rickety old 16-mm projector that clicked along so loudly that if you were sitting next to it, you couldn’t hear the dialogue. We watched patriotic war epics made in the 1940s, or comedies, mostly from the 1940s and ’50s, the Ealing comedies that introduced me to actors like Alec Guinness and Terry-Thomas. There were the Shakespeare plays, Othello, Macbeth, and the rest. Sometimes there would be a documentary, say about a trip up the Congo River, with the colonial baggage-bearers glistening under the hot sun and an imperturbable English guide trekking into darkest Africa, a sort of Livingston who would dress for dinner, even when no other “civilized Englishmen” were near.

  There was also TV, about one hour per week for the older boys. Our favorite was The Man from U.N.C.L.E. We were also allowed to sometimes watch Top of the Pops, a weekly program with the latest pop and rock hits being lip-synched live. The Kinks, Beatles, Petula Clark, Roy Orbison, and the Rolling Stones became part of my inner vocabulary.

  I was overjoyed by the movies and TV. I had been longing to see movies, any movies, not to mention listening to rock music and jazz. I had barely seen a TV set since my memorable polio-operation-summer in America.

  Mrs. Parke encouraged everyone to play music. I took lessons and played the piano badly, but that didn’t hinder me from joining in our many music evenings where I’d thump out a few minutes of boogie-woogie. We were allowed to carry hatchets into the woods to cut down trees—only birches, though, and brush, never the oaks—to build our camps and rafts. There were three ponds as well as the River Ouse. Sometimes the semiwild pigs from our farm were allowed to root in the forest for acorns and we would make a game out of running past them. And we were allowed to do anything we wanted in the way of climbing the enormous trees, making huts, rafts, and treehouses, digging caves, fishing in the river, bicycling, anything at all as long as we were always back for tea, prep, classes, chapel, and sports.